Ethereum (ETH) closer to retaking the number 2 spot: Can it overtake XRP before 2019?﻿

It’s been an interesting month for Ethereum (ETH). After a year of huge losses, and never ending criticism for its scaling issues, Ethereum is back. In the last few weeks, Ethereum (ETH) has been one of the best performers in the market. Part of the rise has come from the announcement that Raiden is now live on the Ethereum mainnet.

This bullish momentum has seen Ethereum (ETH) narrow the gap with XRP (XRP). At the moment, Ethereum (ETH) has a market cap of $14,181,637,645 while XRP’s market cap stands at 15,221,344,247. This is a very narrow gap considering that a few weeks ago, XRP was ahead of Ethereum by close to $5 billion. If its current momentum continues, Ethereum (ETH) could overtake XRP (XRP) before the New Year.

Related articles

However, even if this doesn’t happen in this period, chances are that at some point in 2019, Ethereum (ETH) will be back to number 2. There are a number of factors that support this possibility. The most important one is that Ethereum (ETH) is solving most of the problems that led to its massive price decline in 2018.

The most important of them being scalability. Ethereum (ETH) is getting closer to achieving the level of scalability that would make it useful in building large scale Dapps. The release of Raiden red eyes on the Ethereum mainnet points to the increased pace towards making Ethereum a scalable and practical world computer. The price pump that Ethereum has experienced recently goes to show that the market does believe in the power of Ethereum, and if it can scale effectively, buyers would flock in. Therefore, once more upgrades get released in 2019, demand for Ethereum (ETH) could rise significantly, and possibly push it past XRP (XRP), whose upside momentum has been relatively weak lately.

It is also noteworthy
that Ethereum (ETH)’s drop was largely sentiment driven. The selloff was
largely fear driven, and didn’t exactly reflect Ethereum’s true value. That’s
because from a fundamentals perspective, Ethereum (ETH) is only second to
bitcoin (BTC) in terms of the network effect. On top of that, its scalability
issues are only an issue because it is the most used smart contracts platforms
in the market. Most of the platforms that are competing with Ethereum (ETH)
only appear better because of their low transaction volumes. Most of them would
crumble if they were to carry the load that Ethereum (ETH) handles at any given
time. That’s why its upgrades are also slower because it is a more complex
system.

Now that
investors can see improvements developments get implemented, with more upgrade
in the way, sentiment is likely to improve, as can be seen in the buying pressure
of the last few weeks. The release of
more updates in 2019, would not only see Ethereum (ETH) retake its position,
but also possibly retest its 2017 highs within the year. It’s definitely one of
the cryptos to watch in the coming year. 2 months ago, Vitalik Buterin said
that Ethereum 2.0 is not far away, and every indication is that he was right. Maybe
2019 will be the year of Ethereum.

CryptoRecorder.com is a Dedicated Cryptocurrency news website and writes a variety of educational articles related to smart crypto trading, bitcoin and altcoins. You will find a details article on almost every hot altcoin and unbiased analysis of coins.